Excerpts from the Filling Business magazine - April 2004 issue

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But what influences seam quality

Israeli company Quality By Vision recently completed an exercise for Japanese drinks company Kirin Breweries to improve seam quality on its filling lines. While at the start of the tests all the seamer heads were adjusted to the same specification, some heads were able to close three times more cans than other heads, without requiring adjustments, says Quality By Vision's technical director Ofer LaOr. So every few million cans one of the seamer heads would go out of alignment and start producing bad seams. While some heads required more frequent stops, others could go on producing good seams without needing readjustment: the end result was that the seamer had to be stopped whenever any of the heads went out of alignment, followed soon after by another.

"Stop rates tend to reduce to lifespan of the seamer", said LaOr. A seamer, just like an airplane, tends to have failures primarily during "liftoff" and "landing". One that stops less will have a longer lifespan so, in short, reducing the number of stops for the seamer is of critical important to efficiency and performance.

Back at Kirin, Quality By Vision concentrated on isolating the problem, eliminating both the cans and ends, roll and chuck profiles and roll motion. As in many plants, the problem was found to be the initial positioning of the first and second operation rolls against the chuck. At the time the brewer was using feeler gauges on the seamers, but this is a slow, specialised and a highly-skilled job and an imprecise science. Quality By Vision approached the problem by finding a new method of measuring clearance values. This uses computerised optical gauge that gathers measurements within the seamer.

This, the company says, is fast and accurate; can be undertaken by an unskilled operator; makes seamer adjustments uniform; eliminates the need for extensive seamer testing; and means a seamer's calibration and performance can be monitored and accurately reported. The technique is still under evaluation and will be launched when test results are completed.

All rights reserved (c) 2004 - Sayers Publishing group, The Filling Business - published with permission.